Detailansicht

In: KulturPoetik 2011, Heft 1

Autor

Uta Schürmann

Titel

Die Konstruktion des Zufalls

Kategorie

Beitrag

Abstract

In Woody Allen’s Match Point, the tennis ball that »hits the top of the net« and arbitrarily decides whether to »go forward or fall back« embodies a phenomenon that has fascinated artists and writers for centuries: fortune, or chance. While Caravaggio and Duchamp conceive of chance as a set of geometrical rules, Maupassant, Poe, and Fontane turn their attention to the objects of fate, sets of things that make up randomly arranged still lives, or random chains of events. Yet all of these apparently unintended coincidences are in fact highly artificial productions. The article deals with several artistic and textual instances of this phenomenon, exploring the paradox of ›constructed chance‹.